Thursday, December 27, 2018

STAGGERING STUDENT DEBT AS AMERICA IMPORTS WORKERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

College-Grad Salaries Eroded by Hidden 

Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers



Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

November: Foreign Workers See Nearly 5X Job Growth of Americans

 


YOU EVER HEARD THE TERM E-VERIFY COME OUT OF TRUMP’S BIG MOUTH?

“While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs, there remain about six million Americans who are unemployed, 12 percent of whom are teenagers and nearly six percent of whom are black Americans.” JOHN BINDER

In 2017, visa overstays outnumbered illegal border crossings, leading many restrictionists to prioritize policies such as E-Verify that would discourage overstayers from remaining in the country. THEODORE KUPFER.

“I decided that something was wrong with the world and not me”

College loan debt and the life of an adjunct professor

The ballooning of student loan debt and the growing preponderance of part-time, low-paid adjunct professors are two sides of the deepening degradation of the American higher education system. Once the envy of the world, US colleges now specialize in education on the cheap while young people are increasingly preyed upon by the Department of Education in the form of loans.
Last month, student loan debt set a new record at $1.465 trillion, more than double its level in June 2009. Over 2.7 million borrowers owe in excess of $200,000 each and face a lifetime of escalating interest costs and penalties—a modern form of debt peonage. The number of people 60 and over still paying on student loans has quadrupled since 2005. The federal government is garnisheeing up to 15 percent of indebted seniors’ Social Security payments for their college loans.
The average cost of tuition at public colleges has nearly doubled in the decade since 2003. At the same time, the quality of higher education has been hammered. Many schools now routinely staff more than half their classes with part-time adjunct lecturers or graduate teaching assistants. For example, the University of California-Berkeley charges $14,170 in tuition (in-state) but has part-time faculty and graduate assistants teaching 68 percent of its classes. George Washington University charges $47,343 a year and has 61 percent low-wage staff.
Student loan debt keeps growing
The WSWS Teacher Newsletter spoke with adjunct professor “Rebecca” at a US community college who was eager to expose the impossible situation faced by so many college instructors but asked that a pseudonym be used to protect her various jobs.
“As for my story, I found my way to the WSWS as someone who has had their life basically stolen from them by the 2008 financial crisis,” Rebecca explained.
“I was looking forward to a promising life—I had an outstanding resume, had worked hard and had had tons of opportunity before the crash. But after the economy collapsed, my future evaporated. I went straight home to live with family in 2009 after earning my master’s degree because jobs were just disintegrating—a deeply unfair step to have to have taken after enduring such a difficult and expensive education.
“I networked, worked for free, and took whatever low-wage job I could find. Like any good American I believed for some time that things would turn around if I just kept trying. But by 2014 I decided enough was enough. I had finally landed a fairly fun and meaningful part-time job, but was laid off after only four months.
“I decided that something was wrong with the world and not me, if someone like me had to endure five years of joblessness and crisis just to land a part-time job that only ended up lasting four months.
“All the while I’ve been barely hanging on in part-time adjunct teaching jobs at community colleges. They do not pay enough to live and do not provide me with any dignity or real future. I work for several community colleges at the same time, as an online instructor. As you know, there are adjuncts living in their cars, homeless. The only way most, I believe, can live is to have a husband or wife support them. I myself had to take money from my family when I couldn’t pay my bills.”
Adjuncts receive on average in the US only $2,700 a semester per class and find themselves constantly applying to various institutions to double-up as much as possible, like Rebecca. An estimated 31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line, with one in four receiving some type of public assistance. At least 1.3 million professors across the US are working on contingent contracts.
The growth of the “adjunct industry,” like the student loan debt industry, has followed the systematic defunding of higher education since the 1980s. This trend intensified in the wake of the 2008 crash. Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in 2017 was $9 billion below 2008, after adjusting for inflation. “State-funded” schools now, on average, receive only half of their costs from taxes, making up the difference with ever-escalating tuition hikes and cuts to education, including the growing reliance on low-paid adjuncts. During this period, state tax subsidies and various forms of abatements to big business have proliferated.
Most teachers are terribly conflicted between their passion for the work and the difficulties of subsisting on an adjunct’s salary. Rebecca spoke with obvious emotion, “My students love me, I work hard and I see that they really need a teacher. They want direction, they want to grow into their potential as people, to be able to think about things, and become a meaningful, valuable person to society. It is the absolute birthright of every human being to do that, in my opinion.
“But it’s very difficult to help make that happen as an adjunct because I’m not paid enough to give them all they need to grow. All I can see most days is the terrifying last day of the semester when I’ll be cut off payroll and struggling to survive once again with no income. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this, physically and mentally.”
States have slashed funding for higher education nationally
Many, including Rebecca, have their problems compounded by their own student loan debt. She related, “I had to take out about $29,000 in student loans for my degrees. But it has gone up another $10,000 in the last 10 years due to being out of work. I can’t believe that for the privilege of being unemployed I get to pay the government $10,000 in interest. All education should be free!”
Reflecting on these trends, she said, “Students are beginning to think that college is a fraud. It merely dabbles in education. How is it that Harvard has a $32 billion endowment, that’s as much as the gross domestic product of many African countries? What is that even for? These schools are in an ‘amenities race’ too, I think, to attract rich students or turn poor ones into indentured servants through loan schemes. Most are no longer trying to serve the poor. Then they are involved in all kinds of investment deals, and attached to corporations and the military. It’s disgusting, an outrage really.
“There are so many cool young people, very smart, who are so vulnerable who are getting sucked into these institutions that give them so little, it’s infuriating. They trust these institutions, and these institutions are using them and betraying them. I’ve seen some figure this out and just give up on college, or make do with community college and an associate degree—they don’t want to go into debt and end up with no job, of course. College loan debt is a Ponzi scheme. Some that do decide to go to a four-year school and need a degree talk about it as if it were a nail in their coffin.”
Rebecca spoke on her attitude toward the root causes of this crisis: “Today’s capitalism is degrading the quality of human services and destroying the lives of the working people. Vital human developments are being corrupted by its ceaseless demand of endless growth and profit. Many important ideas never get off the ground today because costs are so astronomical, and they may not serve a profit motive. But we still need and want these things.
“Public education in America is like that. It has largely been successful in its past mission of being a public good that gives average people a vital service at a low cost. But it now deals in all kinds of things that have little to do with education and more to do with administrator salaries, construction contracts and big sports money. This has to stop. Working-class students, instructors and the public should be given control over our universities.
“I have abandoned almost all faith in our mainstream institutions. I see our culture and this economic system as basically totally bankrupt. Mentally I’ve moved completely beyond it and its value systems and have dedicated myself to working to put an end to the severe class issues now plaguing American society and the rest of the world.”
Referencing the escalating class struggles around the world, Rebecca concluded, “I was so excited to learn about the ‘yellow vests,’ that is the ordinary people rising up. I hope to see the whole world out in the streets in those same vests very soon! Let’s stop participating in capitalism’s crumbling charade. Organize and start building a dignified world for the working class!”


“The undermining of the I.R.S.’s enforcement capability coincides nicely with the Republican playbook: Enrich wealthy individuals and corporations with tax giveaways that balloon the deficit, justifying spending cuts for health care, education and infrastructure, then amplify the process by not holding high-end taxpayers accountable for the amounts they owe.”


"The Democrats have provided the votes to fund the Pentagon’s record $700 billion budget and secure the confirmation of black-site torture administrator Gina Haspel to head the CIA. They put up no serious opposition to Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and the rich. Meanwhile, work requirements are being imposed on Medicaid and food stamps, with virtually no opposition from the Democratic Party."



"While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely 
parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment.
The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009."




A Gutted I.R.S. Makes the Rich Richer


With enforcement enfeebled, as much as 20 percent of potential tax revenues go uncollected.
By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Let’s take a moment to pity the Internal Revenue Service. Yes, to many Americans, it’s a money-grabbing ogre siphoning hard-earned cash to the faceless federal bureaucracy.
But the nation’s tax collector today is an enfeebled enforcer. Its budget has been bled dry by a Republican Congress in service to wealthy donors and businesses aggressively pursuing tax avoidance, leaving uncollected 18 percent to 20 percent of potential tax revenues annually. That’s the conclusion in articles by the journalism site ProPublica, co-published by The Atlantic and The Times.

Loopholes are beyond the means of most Americans who earn salaries or are paid hourly wages, and are exploited by those who derive significant income from investments or business revenue. Although we’d all like to pay less, relative to most developed nations our tax burden is a pretty good deal.

It’s an even better deal for the richest Americans, who have benefited the most from President Trump’s tax cuts. The rich are different: They’re more likely to cheat, according to one study of I.R.S. data. And the I.R.S. has about as many auditors now as it did 60 years ago, when there were half as many Americans. The undermining of the I.R.S.’s enforcement capability coincides nicely with the Republican playbook: Enrich wealthy individuals and corporations with tax giveaways that balloon the deficit, justifying spending cuts for health care, education and infrastructure, then amplify the process by not holding high-end taxpayers accountable for the amounts they owe.

Dodging taxes is as old as taxes themselves. Just ask Mr. Trump, who has employed systematic dodging for decades, according to a Times investigation.

We got a good look at one of the bigger problems, the proclivity of the wealthy to hide cash from the I.R.S., in 2008, when the Justice Department was able to pierce the Swiss bank secrecy veil during an investigation of UBS. The department uncovered thousands of rich Americans who were hiding about $18 billion in offshore accounts arranged by that Swiss bank. Many were compelled to fess up and pay up. But eight years later, the Panama Papers, millions of files hacked from a Panamanian law firm that specialized in caching money for the rich and powerful, disclosed that there were still plenty of rich people willing to play hide-and-seek with the I.R.S.

The odds are in their favor, and growing. ProPublica reported that I.R.S. audits dropped 42 percent from 2010 to 2017, a period in which the I.R.S. budget was lopped by $2.5 billion, adjusted for inflation. New investigations of people who don’t file dropped to 362,000 last year, from 2.4 million in 2011. That costs the Treasury $3 billion annually in uncollected taxes. More than $8 billion in back taxes did not get collected in 2017 because the agency couldn’t get to them before the 10-year statute of limitations ran out, another worsening problem. Tax delinquents can simply wait the agency out. ProPublica estimated the total shortfall of uncollected funds since 2011 at $95 billion.

These uncollected billions could pay for any number of things: better care of wounded veterans, infrastructure improvements such as a desperately needed new tunnel between New York and New Jersey. You could even build an expensive wall.
One area where the I.R.S. still bares its teeth is in auditing people in the lowest tax bracket. If you are claiming the earned-income tax credit, which provides cash for people who typically earn less than $20,000 annually, you are as likely to be audited as someone earning between $500,000 and $1 million. ProPublica reported that 36 percent of all I.R.S. audits focused on this group. It may not be a crime to be poor in the G.O.P.’s America, but you can expect to be treated like a criminal for accepting the government’s cash to make ends meet. At best, that’s an inefficient use of I.R.S. agents: Compliance should apply to all, but the I.R.S. should do most of its fishing where the big fish are.

The Trump/G.O.P. tax policy is now operating at peak failure. The tax cuts have failed to increase gross domestic product beyond the “sugar high” stimulus they gave to an economy already heading toward record low unemployment. The economy seems to be slowing, making a mockery of the promise of strong growth that was used to peddle the tax cuts.

The stock market is shuddering at the idea of a slowdown, which corporations contributed to by using their tax windfall to buy back more than $1 trillion of their own stock. They have, to this point, immolated capital instead of using it for additional hiring, increased wages or further business investments.

A CNBC poll found that millionaires are still sanguine about the economy. They can well afford to be. If their stocks lose value, they can take a write-off. If stocks rise, their maximum long-term capital gains tax is only 20 percent. Most American households don’t own stocks — or no longer own them, having been forced to liquidate stock holdings in the Great Recession, which was precipitated by a collapse in the housing market. Thus the wealth gap grows, reaching levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties.

To pay for the millionaire tax cuts, sacrifices had to be made. So Congress limited deductions for state and local taxes to $10,000 annually. While that generally applies to well-to-do people who can itemize their tax returns, it was also a clear shot against blue states such as California and New York that have relatively high state and local taxes. But reducing these deductions, along with higher interest rates, punished the housing market, which is stagnant nationally and in a free fall in the Northeast.

Our ability to keep the $1 trillion deficit created by the Trump tax cuts from deepening depends in part on collecting taxes to which the government is legally entitled.
Think of it this way: To protect our nation, we have the most powerful army in the world. To protect our tax base, we have an army on the order of Liechtenstein’s.
The lack of deterrence will only encourage more cheating. The I.R.S. needs to be capable of doing the job for which it was created — from answering taxpayers’ questions to chasing down the richest cheats, even if they occupy the Oval Office.


As CEO compensation soars  and 

banksters' plunder to new heights


"Another Fed study, “The Demographics of Wealth,” found that people born in the 1980s, part of the millennial generation, were at the greatest risk of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. This age group is one of the most likely to be saddled with student debt."

While workers are told by politicians of both big business parties that there is “no money” to pay for decent wages, education, health care or retirement, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index are sitting on the largest cash stockpile in history, with estimates varying between $1.8 and $2.2 trillion as of the end of 2017.

Fifty-one million US households cannot afford “survival budget”

By Kate Randall
26 May 2018
Newly released data cast a revealing light on the state of income inequality in America a decade after the Great Recession. While CEO pay soars to unheard of heights, nearly 51 million US households cannot afford basic necessities like housing, food and health care. The figures show that a tiny oligarchy of the super-rich continues to tighten its grip over society, as more and more families struggle to get by.
The New York Times on Friday published the Equilar 200 Highest-Paid CEO Rankings for 2017. The survey, conducted annually by the executive compensation consulting firm Equilar, lists the pay packages awarded to CEOs at US public companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.
Entries regarding the 10 highest-paid CEOs in 2017 show not only massive compensation packages, but huge percentage increases over 2016.
·         No. 1: Hock E. Tan of Broadcom, total compensation of $103,211,163—a 318 percent increase over 2016
·         No. 2: Frank J. Bisignano of First Data, total compensation of $102,210,396—a 646 percent increase over 2016
·         No. 10: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor, total compensation of $43,160,584—a 3,400 percent increase over 2016
This year for the first time, as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking law, publicly traded US corporations must begin publishing comparisons between the pay of their chief executive and the median compensation of other employees. (Figures are not yet available for all of the highest-earning CEOs.)
The following are just a few of the pay ratios for 2017:
·         Mindy Grossman, Weight Watchers International, with $33,371,856 in total compensation, received 5,908 times the median employee pay ($6,013).
·         Margaret H. Georgiadis, Mattel, with $31,275,289 in total compensation, received 4 , 987 times the median employee pay ($6,271).
·         Michael Rapino, Live Nation Entertainment, whose total compensation rose by 577 percent to $70,615,760, received 2,893 times the median employee pay ($24,416).
Put another way, a Walmart worker earning the company’s median salary of $19,177 would have to work for more than 1,000 years to earn the $22.2 million that company CEO Doug McMillon was awarded in 2017.
Among the companies that disclosed CEO pay ratios, the median was 275 to 1, i.e., the typical employee would have to work 275 years to earn the annual compensation of his or her company’s CEO.
While CEO compensation continues to climb—with the top 200 CEOs receiving an average raise of 14 percent in 2017, compared to 9 percent in 2016 and 5 percent in 2015—there are 50.8 million US households that cannot afford a basic monthly budget, including housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a smart phone. The new data was made available Tuesday by the United Way ALICE Project.
Those struggling to meet a basic monthly budget include 16.1 million households living below the official federal poverty level, an abysmally low $24,300 for a family of four in 2016. Also included, however, were another 34.7 million families called ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In other words, these households include working members and are not “officially” poor, but cannot afford basic necessities.
As the ALICE Project press release on the data notes, “ALICE is the nation’s child care workers, home health aides and store clerks—those men and women who work at low-paying jobs, having little or no savings and are one emergency from poverty.” Workers at companies whose CEOs rank in the top 200 in pay fall into this category, including McDonald’s, Walgreens, Office Depot and food service companies Aramark and Sysco.
Data highlighted by the research includes the following:
·         Two-thirds of all US jobs in the country are low-paying—less than $20 an hour, or $40,000 a year if full-time.
·         More than 30 percent of households in each state cannot afford a basic “survival budget.” The percentage of these families ranges from 32 percent in North Dakota to 49 percent in California, New Mexico and Hawaii.
·         Those families earning over the poverty level but struggling to afford basic necessities outnumber similarly struggling households living in poverty in all 50 states.
·         California, Texas and Florida—the first, second and fourth most populous states, respectively--have the largest number of ALICE households in the country.
Also published Tuesday was a study by the Federal Reserve Board that exposes the precarious financial situation facing millions of American workers and their families. The “Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017” found that 4 in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either be unable to cover it or would pay for it by selling a possession or borrowing money.
For working class families, such unexpected expenses could include a medical bill, a car repair, home repairs, appliance replacement, unexpected taxes or fines—the list goes on. While the CEOs in the top 200 have assets stashed away in rainy day funds in the millions, an unexpected emergency can mean going without food, being forced deeper into credit card debt, debt collection or eviction. The study found that 3 percent of renters were evicted or moved because of the threat of eviction in the last two years.
The report noted that one-fifth of non-retired adults are pessimistic about their future employment opportunities. A substantial number of workers are in precarious employment, with one-sixth having irregular work schedules imposed by their employer, and one-tenth receiving their work schedules less than a week in advance.
The study reported that over half of college attendees under age 30 have taken on debt to pay for their education. Those who failed to complete a degree, and those who attended for-profit institutions, were more likely to have fallen behind on their payments. Among those making payments on their student loans, the typical monthly payment was between $200 and $300, or 6 to 9 percent of total income for someone working full-time at $20 an hour.
Another Fed study, “The Demographics of Wealth,” found that people born in the 1980s, part of the millennial generation, were at the greatest risk of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. This age group is one of the most likely to be saddled with student debt. While all families headed by someone born in 1960 or later have failed to recover economically since the Great Recession, those born in the 1980s are the least likely to have recovered to their pre-1980 financial level.
Not surprisingly, the “Economic Well-Being” report found that less than two-thirds of non-retired adults thought their retirement savings are on track. One-fourth had no retirement savings or pension whatsoever.
While workers are told by politicians of both big business parties that there is “no money” to pay for decent wages, education, health care or retirement, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index are sitting on the largest cash stockpile in history, with estimates varying between $1.8 and $2.2 trillion as of the end of 2017.
The obscene levels of compensation doled out to the CEOs and the corresponding struggle of working class families to pay basic monthly bills provoke no serious response from the Democratic Party, which is fixated on the claims of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 elections.
The Democrats have provided the votes to fund the Pentagon’s record $700 billion budget and secure the confirmation of black-site torture administrator Gina Haspel to head the CIA. They put up no serious opposition to Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and the rich. Meanwhile, work requirements are being imposed on Medicaid and food stamps, with virtually no opposition from the Democratic Party.
The working class must break from both parties of the capitalist class and build a mass socialist movement to seize the wealth of the financial elite and put an end to the profit system. This is the only basis for meeting essential social needs.

Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of American Working Class




AFP
23 Dec 20181,726
3:00

The billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class since 1979, new wage data reveals.

Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
Breitbart TV
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about $29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every year.
(Public Citizen)
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce. Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Study: Elite Zip Codes Thrived in Obama Recovery, Rural America Left Behind



Getty Images
10 Dec 2018549
4:49

Wealthy cities and elite zip codes thrived under the slow-moving economic recovery of President Obama while rural American communities were left behind, a study reveals.

The Economic Innovation Group research, highlighted by Axios, details the massive economic inequality between the country’s coastal city elites and middle America’s working class between the Great Recession in 2007 and Obama’s economic recovery in 2016.
Between 2007 and 2016, the number of residents living in elite zip codes grew by more than ten million, with an overwhelming faction of that population growth being driven by mass immigration where the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants annually.
The booming 44.5 million immigrant populations are concentrated mostly in the country’s major cities like Los Angeles, California, Miami Florida, and New York City, New York. The rapidly growing U.S. population — driven by immigration — is set to hit 404 millionby 2060, a boon for real estate developers, wealthy investors, and corporations, all of which benefit greatly from dense populations and a flooded labor market.
The economic study found that while the population grew in wealthy cities, America’s rural population fell by nearly 3.5 million residents.
Likewise, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
A map included in the research shows how rich, coastal metropolises have boomed economically while entire portions of middle America have been left behind as job and business gains remain concentrated at the top of the income ladder.
(Economic Innovation Group) 
(Economic Innovation Group)
Economic growth among the country’s middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed national economic growth, the study found.
For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4 percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth in the median county.
The same can be said of employment growth, where U.S. employment grew by about 9.3 percent from 2012 to 2016. In the median zip code, though, employment grew by only 5.5 percent and in the median county, employment grew by less than four percent.
“Nearly three in every five large counties added businesses on net over the period, compared to only one in every five small one,” the report concluded.
Elite zip codes added more business establishments during Obama’s economic recovery, between 2012 and 2016, than the entire bottom 80 percent of zip codes combined. For instance, while more than 180,000 businesses have been added to rich zip codes, the country’s bottom tier has lost more than 13,000 businesses even after the economic recovery.
(Economic Innovation Group) 
(Economic Innovation Group)
The gutting of the American manufacturing base, through free trade, has been a driving catalyst for the collapse of the white working class and black Americans. Simultaneously, the outsourcing of the economy has brought major wealth to corporations, tech conglomerates, and Wall Street.
The dramatic decline of U.S. manufacturing at the hands of free trade—where more than 3.4 million American jobs have been lost solely due to free trade with China, not including the American jobs lost due to agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS)—has coincided with growing wage inequality for white and black Americans, a growing number of single mother households,  a drop in U.S. marriage rates, a general stagnation of working and middle class wages, and specifically, increased black American unemployment.
“So, the loss of manufacturing work since 1960 represents a steady decline in relatively high-paying jobs for less-educated workers,” recent research from economist Eric D. Gould has noted.
Fast-forward to the modern economy and the wage trend has been the opposite of what it was during the peak of manufacturing in the U.S. An Economic Policy Institute studyfound this year that been 2009 and 2015, the top one percent of American families earned about 26 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent of Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Record high income in 2017 for top one percent of wage earners in US

In 2017, the top one percent of US wage earners received their highest paychecks ever, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Based on newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the EPI shows that the top one percent of the population saw their paychecks increase by 3.7 percent in 2017—a rate nearly quadruple the bottom 90 percent of the population. The growth was driven by the top 0.1 percent, which includes many CEOs and corporate executives, whose pay increased eight percent and averaged $2,757,000 last year.
The EPI report is only the latest exposure of the gaping inequality between the vast majority of the population and the modern-day aristocracy that rules over them.
The EPI shows that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have increased their pay by 22.2 percent between 1979 and 2017. Today, this bottom 90 percent makes an average of just $36,182 a year, which is eaten up by the cost of housing and the growing burden of education, health care, and retirement.
Meanwhile, the top one percent has increased its wages by 157 percent during this same period, a rate seven times faster than the other group. This top segment makes an average of $718,766 a year. Those in-between, the 90th to 99th percentile, have increased their wages by 57.4 percent. They now make an average of $152,476 a year—more than four times the bottom 90 percent.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Even more, while the bottom 90 percent of the population may take in 61 percent of the wages, large sections of the workforce today barely pull in any income at all. For example, Social Security Administration data found that the bottom 54 percent of wage earners in the United States, 89.5 million people, make an average of just $15,100 a year. This 54 percent of the population earns only 17 percent of all wages paid in America.
However unequal, these wage inequalities still do not fully present the divide between rich and poor. The ultra-wealthy derive their wealth not primarily from wages, but from assets and equities—principally from the stock market. While the bottom 90 percent of the population made 61 percent of the wages in 2017, they owned even less, just 27 percent of the wealth (according to the World Inequality Report 2018 by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman).
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
Wages are so low in the United States that roughly half of the population falls deeper into debt every year. A Reuters report from July found that the pretax net income (that is, income minus expense) of the bottom 40 percent of the population was an average of negative $11,660. Even the middle quintile of the population, the 40th to 60th percentile, breaks even with an average of only $2,836 a year.
As the Social Security Administration numbers show, 67.4 percent of the population made less than the average wage, $48,250 a year in 2017, a sum that is inadequate to support a family in many cities—especially, with high housing costs, health care, education, and retirement factored in.
For the ruling class, though, workers’ wages are already too much. The volatility of the stock market and the deep fear that the current bull market will collapse has made politicians and businessmen anxious of any sign of wage increases.
In August, wages in the US rose just 0.2 percent above the inflation rate, the highest in nine years. Though the increase was tiny, it was enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to increase the interest rate past two percent for the first time since 2008. Raising interest rates helps to depress workers’ wages by lowering borrowing and spending. As the Financial Times noted, stopping wage growth was “central” to the Federal Reserve’s move.
Further analysis of the Social Security Administration data shows that in 2017, 147,754 people reported wages of 1 million dollars or more—roughly, the top 0.05 percent. Their combined total income of $372 billion could pay for the US federal education budget five times over.
These wages, however large, still pale in comparison to the money the ultra-rich acquire from the stock market. For example, share buybacks and dividend payments, a way of funneling money to shareholders, will eclipse $1 trillion this year.
Whatever the immediate source, the wealth of the rich derives from the great mass of people who do the actual work. Across the United States and around the world, workers, young people, and students have entered into struggle this year over pay, education, health care, immigration, war and democratic rights. This growing movement of the working class must set as its aim confiscating the wealth and power of this tiny parasitic oligarchy. Society’s wealth must be democratically controlled by those who produce it.


THE STAGGERING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY UNDER OBAMA'S ADMINISTRATION SERVING THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS.

THE ENTIRE REASON BEHIND AMNESTY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL COST OF "CHEAP" MEXICAN LABOR TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.

AND IT'S WORKING!


SEN. BERNIE SANDERS

“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER

YOU THOUGHT OBAMA INVITED OBAMANOMICS and started the assault on the American middle-class?
NOPE!

“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.

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